Changes

I mentioned the idea of getting some sort of Adventure into my small machine to friends; fortunately, I was not daunted by their laughter. After all, I could remember when it was supposedly impossible to get a BASIC interpreter to run on an 8080microprocessor! Interpreter? Did I say ''interpreter''? Suddenly the idea fell into place! I had written many compilers and operating systems. Why not write an Adventure interpreter? This would allow me to write many Adventures and would also provide the compression I needed to fit them into a small machine. (Inside, I'm really a frustrated science-fiction writer; I have over 3000 science-fiction books in my collection but have never tried to write one myself.) So, weeks later, my initial scribblings had evolved into a working interpreter with a skeleton Adventure to play on it. It took some six months of play-testing before my first Adventure, Adventureland, was finally released through The Software Exchange of Milford, New Hampshire, and Creative Computing Software. Thus the Scott Adams Adventure Series was born. And, at that same moment, it almost died. For six months I had been so engrossed in programming Adventure that my wife [[Alexis Adams|Alexis]] (who at the time was pregnant with Maegen, our daughter) started hiding my floppy disks around the house to get my attention. Once she hid them in the oven-boy, did she get some attention that time! I then decided that one Adventure was enough. Some time after that, Alexis unexpectedly announced that she wanted to write an Adventure, and it was this effort that led to the Scott Adams Adventure given in listings 1 and 2, Pirate's Adventure. With her basic ideas, we created an Adventure that was different from any that had ever been written before. Instead of simply searching for treasures in this Adventure, you now had an added ingredient-a "mission." (In this case, you had to figure out how to build a pirate's ship!) This set the stage for many of my later mission-oriented Adventures that replace a cumulative score with a do-or-die situation. These include my Mission Impossible, The Count, Voodoo Castle, and Mystery Fun House Adventures. All my current Adventures, for the Apple II, the Radio Shack TRS-80, and the Exidy Sorcerer, are written in machine language and run much faster and cleaner than the original BASIC versions (of which there were only two and a half). I probably would never have written these programs in machine language if it had not been for the gentle nudges I received from a friend I've never met but greatly respect, Lance Micklus.